This is the scene across the street from our house. Our neighbor to the east has a small herd of cattle, and they wander around these hills snacking on the greenery. They need a big space, and can pick it clean in a hurry if their feed isn’t supplemented back at the barn. They really love hanging out in the field, and will find the sunny spots if there are any.
Technical info: This is single shot taken with the modernized view camera I use (Cambo ACTUS, Cambo being a firm in the Netherlands that has been doing camera engineering wonders for almost 75 years. Taken with a 135mm Fujinon lens I used to use on a 4x5 film camera.
I enjoyed my time doing film last year, but was a bit disappointed in what I found. Yes, film has things like grain and dynamic range unique to a given type, and one can use this to set a mood or tell a story with a photo. All the same, digital has gotten to a point where resolution and color are so richly recorded that you have a much more extensive palette to work with in digital. Probably the one thing about film that gave it an advantage for me was that it was so damn complicated it really made you think about what you were going to do with a shot.
Using digital on a view camera has pretty much the same effect, not least because I am using some historic high-quality lenses, the same ones that I relied on for film. Now that I can take digital shots with traditional film lenses, I can see that the best of them were pretty damn good. :)
There is nothing old-fashioned about the shot - it’s not in black and white, there is no film grain to be found. But I still had to take my time to set up the camera, and it makes you pay attention to what you are seeing. It may be just cow butts and green grass, but it also has a mood, an arrangement, that I find pleasing. All due to technology serving me in the way that I require. Just like a former technology did, with some differences, as always.
More is coming in this vein; I’m making a shift from Sony and the 35mm digital world to Phase One and the medium format digital world. I am fortunate to have worked in optics and astrophotography for the last few decades, and I have acquired a lot of knowledge about recording images that I am putting to good use these days for terrestrial photography. It’s a blast. :)
Here’s another stitched shot from today. I was tired and needed an artistic intervention, so I took out the digital view camera with Sony and the same Fujinon lens attached. I went down to a bridge over the Puyallup River in Orting, WA. I hoped to find a good view of the water, but the trails there are all through the woods and there is very little river visible even with the leaves off.
As I was returning to the car, I saw two trees near each other: one with dark, almost black bark and very tall, and a grey, exposed-wood skeleton of a tree. I went to swap lenses, only to remember that I did not bring my lens-swapping tool. So I had to use the 135mm again, and had to set up close to the dead tree because the land slopped pretty seriously behind me, nowhere to back up to to get the shot far enough away. DO the spidery black-barked tree will have to wait for another day.
The trees were behind a bright blue gate and a black fence, either of which would have spoiled the scene, so I fully extended my tripod and set it up on the other side of the fence to get a shot. Of course, now I could barely see the back screen of the camera, but it was just enough to work with.
This is a stitched image (nine shots, 3x3, 135mm Fujinon at f/11 a quick 45 seconds before sunset, really moving to get all the shots before the light went out. Thanks to the sunset tints, it is nicely hued with oranges and browns. This is about as close as I have ever gotten to a true medium format look with a 35mm camera. I did a very careful stretch of the dynamic range to get there; fortunately, I am not comfortable enough with the hardware to have been able to dial in the exposure fast enough. (I had about a 15-minute wait in shade as the sun was descending, and I shot in the time it took the sun to move from that cloud edge to the trees on the horizon. I guessed about one full stop brighter for when the sun cleared the cloud, and I was just a third-stop off which I quickly adjusted.)